Passing objects between activities in android why Parcelable ? why not JSON string?

Question

I would like to know why object exchange between activities is made as Parcelable and why not as a JSON string. I understand Parcelable is better than Serialization. Can anyone make a comparison between Parcelable and JSON.

Answer 1

I would like to know why object exchange between activities is made as Parcelable and why not as a JSON string

Not everything that can go in a Parcel can go in a JSON string, such as:

• IBinder objects (associated with remote services using AIDL)
• ParcelFileDescriptor
• Exception

Also, while you could convert a byte[] into a String (eg, base-64 encoding), that will be inefficient.

Answer 2

Parcelable is very low level. Therefore its much faster then everything else available nowadays on android (like Serializeable). Json wouldn't make no sense regarding performance (think of performance issues while writing and reading json) and memory space.